Eight years ago, Colleen Echohawk, then executive director of the Chief Seattle Club and later a candidate for Seattle mayor, launched a crusade against the totem poles that had for more than 30 years crowned the Pike Place Market’s Victor Steinbrueck Park, aka “Native Park” — a popular gathering place for urban Indians. The campaign has sparked a mini-culture war that highlights many bigger issues, from intertribal rivalries and the relationship of historic preservation to cultural representation to City Hall’s efforts to clamp down on its advisory boards and commissions.
And it’s still playing out today, as the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation belatedly starts its long-delayed restoration of the poles — and, it seems, missing an opportunity to involve a Native artist in the restoration. The Market’s defenders wonder whether this time the city will come through on its promises.
As Echohawk, who is of Plains Pawnee and Alaskan Ahtna Athabascan heritage, noted, totem poles weren’t originally created by this region’s Salish-language peoples. Though many local nations and artists — including the Jamestown S’Klallam on the Olympic peninsula and the Lummi Nation near Bellingham — have adopted totem poles for local commemorations, this artform originated among the coastal nations of British Columbia and southeast Alaska. They don’t represent the Coast Salish heartland, Echohawk told Cascade PBS, then known as Crosscut: “[T]he lack of cultural representation in the Native community turns into inequity, it turns into poverty, high homelessness rates. These kinds of issues have everything to do with people dying.”…